The Greater Lie

1

Propaganda is a lie that pretends to reveal a greater truth, but in fact conceals a greater lie.

For example, a vice presidential candidate says that it isn't important whether immigrants in an Ohio town are actually abducting and eating their neighbors' house pets because the story, even if false, reveals a greater truth about the dangers posed by illegal immigration. In fact, since the story is demonstrably untrue, the migrants in question are predominantly legal residents, and the immigrant community in the town poses no particular danger to anyone, the lie is in fact intended solely to arouse unjustified fear of certain immigrant groups and to conceal the racist ideology of its disseminators.

For another example, the Speaker of the House of Representatives says that the rioters who ransacked the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 were peaceful protesters and are therefore deserving of presidential pardons. In fact, the Speaker himself, then a rank and file representative, was among hundreds of House members and their staff who had to run for their lives from the attackers, who engaged in an hours-long pitched battle with Capitol police that resulted in several deaths and numerous serious injuries, and that the entire world watched as it unfolded live on television. The lie is intended merely to conceal the Speaker's craven impulse to stay on the good side of the President, on whose political largesse his position largely depends, and who has waged a years-long campaign to reframe this shameful event as a glorious act of patriotism.

And one more: the President of the United States grants an interview to a man who denied that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School ever happened and that those who perpetrated this alleged fraud were "crisis actors" on a mission to take away the people's right to bear arms. The President himself has never publicly made such a claim, and has in fact occasionally expressed sympathy for the victims of violence (in selected instances). But by being on the program of a notorious conspiracy theorist, he is giving a wink and a nod to Second Amendment absolutists, making it plain what he really thinks about gun control, and sending an unequivocal signal that, despite any anodyne statements he might make about gun violence to the citizenry in general, he intends to never do anything about it.

Throughout history, rulers have routinely exercised their prerogative to rewrite the story of their own ascendancy in terms that are more favorable to themselves and their own tribe, clan, family or party. From the perspective of later times, we often wonder how people could have convinced themselves of "truths" which are self-evidently absurd, and yet there is no shortage of examples emerging before our very eyes that demonstrate the phenomenon very convincingly. So the next time you hear someone deny that the Holocaust happened, or assert that American slavery was actually beneficial to the slaves, do not shake your head in disbelief that people in the past could have been so blind, evil or gullible. Remember instead that millions of our fellow citizens are at this very moment and of their own volition wiping their memories clean of easily demonstrable facts, in order to make room in their minds for whatever politically expedient lie or plainly implausible conspiracy theory comports with a morass of mistaken notions that have planted themselves there.

2

There was a time in recent memory when the precept "the ends justify the means" was considered an unmitigated evil. This was the province of fascist dictators, communist despots, and their apologists, who asserted that any excess on the road to utopia — be it the confinement and torture of dissidents, the scapegoating of minorities, the slaughter and starvation of innocents, or the invasion of neighboring countries and the consequent horrors of war — can easily be justified in the pursuit of paradise, which will eventually ensue once the people, if any were left, reached the promised land. With so many enemies about, both foreign and domestic, and so noble a goal in sight, of what consequence are mere lies? Who can concern themselves with the niceties of truth-telling when blood is flowing in the streets? Don't we all know that the truth is up for grabs anyway, and that the victors are the only ones who get to write history?

We — meaning the West, including America — were supposed to be different. Regrettably, as the Cold War progressed, the opponents of Communism gradually adopted the methods of their disreputable foes. Espionage, clandestine killings and proxy wars were no less part of our playbook than theirs, though we comforted ourselves by insisting that, unlike the godless Communists, right was on our side and our hearts were in the right place. (The Vietnamese may beg to differ.) We did not in fact build a gulag for political dissidents in America, nor did we strip away all the rights of citizens, but in our efforts to undermine our enemies we did, alarmingly, come to resemble them in ways that were, shall we say, disquieting. Shamefully, we also propped up any number of homicidal tyrants, from Chile to the Philippines, because they just happened to be on our side.

Such convergence of opposites was foretold in Hegel's dialectics, which supposed that as opponents grew alike or one grew dominant, new antagonists would inevitably arise. Hence many today, from an arguably simplistic perspective, find little to distinguish the increasingly authoritarian America from the increasingly capitalist China, as their rivalry is driven not by any purported ideological differences but by their mutually abhorrent pursuit of mammon. In our defense, some will insist that America has perpetrated nothing like the mass incarceration of the Uighurs or the suppression of free speech and democracy in Hong Kong. But as we are on the verge of herding tens of thousands of undocumented migrants (virtually every one of them from a racial or ethnic minority) into internment camps; as our spy agencies, not to mention our corporations, have the means of tracking not just criminals and terrorists but all of us; and as we will no doubt soon see the introduction of bills in Congress and in various state legislatures that would restrict the freedom of the press (aka "enemies of the people") and the activities of opposition political parties ("they're evil people"), any defense of the superiority of our way of life rings increasingly hollow.

When there is little reason to choose one adversary over another, people either do not choose at all, or they choose something else.

3

For more than 70 years starting in 1945, Oscar Brand hosted "Folksong Festival" on WNYC radio in New York. It is reckoned to be the longest-running program hosted by the same person in radio history. Notably, he never received any compensation, but did the show week after week for decades out of a sheer love of music and a desire to share it with his audience. (Also so he could avoid censorship: when people questioned why a city-owned radio station would pay a leftist for a show featuring a steady stream of leftist guests, Brand would simply answer that they weren't paying him.)

He once received a lot of criticism from fellow liberals for inviting Burl Ives onto the program. Ives is now a largely forgotten figure, but in the middle years of the last century he was a very popular folk singer and television personality, famous for holiday songs and shows for children. But to save his own career during the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, he testified as a friendly witness before a congressional committee, and was thereafter vilified by many on the left who considered him a turncoat. Many actors, musicians and other artists were blacklisted during this period and were unable to work. Many were never able to rebuild their careers; some committed suicide.

Brand took a lot of flak for having Ives on his show, but he dismissed these concerns with a blunt riposte: "We on the left do not blacklist."

Well, not any more.

In Brand's time, the humiliation, intimidation or destruction of people whose views were found, by some, to be unpatriotic or merely distasteful was a tactic deployed routinely by the right against those on the left, who mostly stood their ground in defense of even the most villainous exploitation of free speech. The counter-argument was simple and compelling: either speech is free for everyone or it is not free for anyone. We don't get to pick and choose who gets to speak and what they can say. Americans, by right, can express contrarian or even abhorrent views without fear of censorship or official consequences. (It bears remembering that censorship is the province of governments alone. When nonpublic entities like newspapers or websites decline to publish a story, it is not censorship, as detractors commonly declare. A private company may exercise its right to publish whatever speech it chooses.)

Fast forward to the present day, when digital mobs assemble to tear down anyone who has expressed unacceptable opinions, or, in some cases, merely used an unacceptable word or phrase. The consequences sometimes can, as in the anti-Communist fervor of the 1950s, include the loss of one's career. These mobs are invariably progressive. But their tactics are not expressions of liberalism, at least not by the definition that was prevalent through most of the 20th century, but a variety of intolerance that was formerly reserved for doctrinaire Communists and unreformed red-baiters. In other words, extremists.

We're not talking about an assault on truth, which is subject to eternal debate, but on free speech, which is not. Progressives who have perpetrated the ugly public take-downs of recent years will argue that they are in fact serving a greater truth by denying a forum for views which do not conform to the orthodoxy of the moment. (The ubiquity of online videos taken by the attackers themselves is evidence of their revolutionary certitude, so sure are they of the righteousness of their cause.) It is also argued that free speech is just another weapon wielded by an entrenched elite to protect their privilege, overlooking the fact that a mob's denunciations are protected by the very same rights guaranteed to its targets. College students who badger professors for the alleged misuse of some word or phrase that they deem inappropriate are chillingly reminiscent of the Red Guards of Mao's Cultural Revolution. Then, bands of zealous "students" terrorized China by looking for heretics to expose, publicly humiliating them and, in many cases, hounding them literally to death.

Today's cancel warriors are likewise self-appointed judge and jury. If no one in America has yet been killed outright in the left's lurch towards intolerance, it is clearly not out of regard for the rights of the accused. If you believe that the perpetrator, by virtue of deviating from the true path, is guilty of a great evil, then what means of redress would be considered excessive? If progressive zealots could get away with murder — as a right-wing youth did after killing two left-wing protesters in Wisconsin a few years ago — does anyone doubt that they would? And in one other important respect the "justice warriors" render themselves indistinguishable from their counterparts on the right: by dressing up their intolerance as matter of self-defense (i.e., to protect themselves and others from someone else's hurtful speech) and making themselves out to be the victims.

4

In what way does the progressive claim to serve a higher truth differ from the right's use of propaganda, with its callous disregard for actual truth? What lie cannot be justified in service to a principle of one's own devising?

In the years to come, we will continue to bear witness to all manner of creative desecrations of democracy, and stand by as our leaders and fellow citizens contort themselves to accommodate and dismiss the latest outrage. Sadly, the great undermining of our government has been prepared not only by perennial enemies of civil rights on the right but by those on the left who have ceded the center ground to the very people who can do them the most harm. For a small number on the far left, this has been a willful strategy, as they clearly prefer a conservative, even reactionary, government in order to better justify their own ideological opposition. But a study of Western political history of the 20th century makes plain that mainstream parties enjoyed the most success when they eschewed ideological demands from both ends of the spectrum, and made themselves into sensible alternatives to whatever preposterous ideas were tugging at the polity from the extremes.

If the left abandons the fight for free speech in favor of their own intersubjective truths, from which hidden corner of the body politic will its defenders emerge? Certainly not from the masters of propaganda on the other side, their self-proclaimed love of freedom notwithstanding.